Was BB row newsworthy?
- 24 Jan 07, 10:31 AM
We've been having a lively debate at The World Tonight over Big Brother β no, not about who should be evicted from the house, but over how much coverage and prominence the programme should have devoted to the row over alleged racist bullying on the show. We had a lot of complaints from listeners after Friday's programme - here's a flavour:
"I am baffled as to why the Big Brother affair was broadcast as the lead item, especially in view of another news story, the arrest by police of Ruth Turner (the adviser to Tony Blair arrested in connection with the loans for peerages investigation) β¦" The e-mailer went on to say the BB row is just not serious news.
Another listener wrote, βIt is sad that your headline item this evening was the Big Brother story. While the racist issue is worth some reportage, the time you have devoted, not just this evening, to the mechanics of the programme is out of proportion to its overall importance. The World Tonight is supposed to be a serious programme.β
We have received more complaints over this than anything we have done since we led the programme with England's win (a distant memory for England fans now) in the Ashes - another decision many listeners called just plain wrong.
Why did we cover Big Brother? Well, it seemed one of those occasions when many people who don't normally watch this kind of programme were commenting on it - including politicians who were very critical of Channel 4 which like the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ has a public service remit - and that, in the view of many on the team, made it a story worthy of coverage by a programme like ours.
Did we get the coverage right? I'm not so sure we did. The listener who said we did too much on the mechanics of the programme may have a point. We had started out with the intention of talking to an academic who had studied reality TV and could deconstruct it for us and explain why it has the popular appeal it has and how much influence what the audience see has on them as individuals - for instance, does it legitimise racist attitudes. Unfortunately, there are only a few people who have done this kind of work in any depth and none of them were available.
So we decided to focus on the more immediate result of the eviction vote and what that said about public attitudes to racism and we interviewed the publicist Max Clifford whose expertise lies more in how people in the public eye - like Jade Goody in this case - and the interview ended up being predominantly about how someone in her position may be able to recover from bad publicity.
On whether we should have led on the story or should have led on the arrest of Ruth Turner, we had a lively debate. The factors we discussed - and this often applies to discussions over which story we choose to lead the programme with - were
• which story was the most significant - a row that appears to lift the lid on racist attitudes or the arrest of a member of the prime minister's inner circle?
• which story was the freshest news - BB had been around all week, but Jade Goody was voted off the programme 20 minutes before air time, whereas Ruth Turner arrest was announced in mid-afternoon?
• how strong is the material we have on the story - a very good report from our reporter in Bermondsey on attitudes to Jade Goody's behaviour from her local area or strong criticism of the police from Lord Puttnam?
• and informing all of this we consider how a story fits with the agenda of The World Tonight, which aims to take a global, in depth, analytical approach, and whether our audience will be interested in it
There was not consensus among the team on this and we will take on board listenersβ complaints and will carry on discussing whether we got this one right for our programme and our audience.
Alistair Burnett is editor of the World Tonight
